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Tag: google analytics

  • Google Analytics Gets 9 New Languages

    Google Analytics Gets 9 New Languages

    Google Analytics users know that the product just underwent a transformation to a new version, and now Google is adding even more accessibility features to the service.

    Today, Google has added functionality for nine new languages to Analytics.

    The new languages are: Arabic, Croatian, Hebrew, Hindi, Latvian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian.

    We are confident this will improve the usage of Google Analytics across the world, and help website owners and AdWords advertisers get even more out of their internet marketing efforts. Happy data mining!

    These nine new languages bring the total to 40 total languages available to Google Analytics users – “quite the polygot,” Google+Analytics+Blog%29″>according to Google.

    If you wish to change the language for Google Analytics, you must be using the new version. Make sure you’re logged in to your Google account, then click on the settings button at the top right.

    Google Analytics has also updated the help center to support these nine new languages.

  • Urchin Founder Reflects On The Impact Of Urchin And Google Analytics

    Google acquired Urchin all the way back in 2005. It seems like an eternity ago.

    “In 2005 we acquired Urchin, whose online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics, helping businesses of all sizes measure their websites and online marketing,” Google said in its big product shut-down announcement. “We’re fully committed to building an industry-leading online analytics product, so we’re saying goodbye to the client-hosted version, known as Urchin Software. New Urchin Software licenses will no longer be available after March 2012.”

    Paul Muret, Director of Engineering for Google Analytics and co-founder of Urchin, talked about it a bit more on the Google Analytics blog:

    When I started Urchin Software with a few colleagues back in 1998, it was hard to imagine the scale and impact that Urchin and Google Analytics would eventually have. And yet, I remember rolling out the first version of Urchin to our customers and being blown away by the response. It was clear that Urchin was filling a fundamental need to understand customer engagement in a new medium. Suddenly, it made the intangible packets of traffic flying invisibly all over the world very tangible.

    Within a few short years, we built a successful business based on Urchin and “Urchin on Demand”, an online version of the product. In early 2005, we were acquired by Google because it saw the potential of data to create a better web. By liberating this tool we could empower companies of all sizes to become smarter and more effective online. We assigned considerable resources to our online solution and released it to the public for free. Google Analytics has since grown beyond anything that we could have expected.

    The success of Google Analytics has been incredibly rewarding and humbling, and we are very thankful for the support of our early Urchin customers and investors. The Urchin Software product has now been completely overshadowed by its tremendously popular offspring. And so, it is time that we now complete the cycle by officially retiring the Urchin Software product and focus exclusively on online analytics. On behalf of the original Urchin crew and Google, we thank you and hope that we can continue to serve you with amazing products.

    New sales of Urchin will stop at the end of March, but current installations will work “for years to come,” according to Muret.

  • Google Analytics Site Speed Metrics Expanded

    Google Analytics Site Speed Metrics Expanded

    Google announced the launch of some new metrics for the Site Speed report in Google Analytics.

    The metrics are aimed at giving webmaster a better understanding of how they can improve their website performance. Speed, we know, is a ranking signal for Google, so this is probably one worth paying attention to.

    That said, Google’s Matt Cutts did kind of downplay the impact speed actually has on rankings. It’s a signal, but it’s certainly not the loudest. Still, it’s good for the user experience, and we know Google likes that. Of course, it’s always good to have a good user experience no matter what is impact from Google is.

    In the “technical” section in each of the site speed tabs (Explorer, Performance and Map Overlay), there is new set of metrics.

    GA Reports

    “The Technical section of the Explorer and Map Overlay tabs provides details on the network and server metrics,” the company explains on the Google Analytics blog. “Similarly, the additional sections of the Performance tab shows summaries for each of these metrics. These network and server metrics are one component of Avg. Page Load Time; the other component is browser time, i.e., the browser overhead for parsing and executing the JavaScript, rendering the page and other overheads such as fetching additional resources (scripts/stylesheets/images).”

    The site speed report also displays: avg. redirection time, avg. domain lookup time, avg. server connection time, avg. server response time, and avg. page download time.

    “If you notice that some of the metrics are higher than expected, review your site operations and test if changes lead to improvements,” Google says. “For example, if you notice that Avg. Domain Lookup Time is high, you might want to change your DNS provider. A high Server Connection Time, on the other hand, is a metric that you might not be able to reduce.”

    “To most significantly increase your website’s speed, evaluate your Site Speed report for metrics that have the largest values and target those for improvement,” Google adds.

    For example, for a high average redirection time, you might evaluate whether redirects are even necessary. Google suggests also checking to see if a specific referrer is causing high redirect latency. For high average domain lookup time, you might change DNS providers. For high average server response time, you might reduce your backend processing time or place a server closer to users. For high average page load times, reduce your initial data size.

  • Google Invites Social Networks To Push Activity Streams to Google Analytics

    Google is inviting social networks and platforms to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics. “These activity streams will be surfaced in a set of social reports that our team is building to help marketers better measure engagement and impact across social channels (coming next year),” a Google spokesperson tells WebProNews.

    In a post on the Google Analytics Blog, the company says:

    “Every day, millions of people share and engage with content online. But most sharing doesn’t happen on the site where it was published, it happens throughout the social web. Marketers and publishers are looking for a comprehensive view of all interactions with their content – on and off their site – and so we’re working hard to make this happen.”

    “To enable our customers to discover who’s sharing, voting and bookmarking their content on the social web, cross-network measurement needs to become easier.”

    Google is letting any network add things like +1’s, votes, comments, etc. into Google Analytics social reports, so that the info is available for Google Analytics users.

    Google has set up a social data hub based on ActivityStreams and PubsubHubbub, and is already working with Delicious, Digg, Gigya, LiveFyre, ReadItLater, Reddit, TypePad, Vkontakte, Google+, Boogger and Google Groups.

    I couldn’t help but notice that Facebook and Twitter are not on that list.

  • Twitter, Mobile Ads & Reaching Google Analytics Goals

    Today’s video round-up features a webinar about reaching your goals in Google Analytics, the top Internet memes, and a conversation between Eric Schmidt and Loic Le Meur (among other things). Enjoy.

    Here’s today’s viral videos.

    View more daily video round-ups here.

    Reaching your goals with Google Analytics:

    Eric Schmidt and Loic Le Meur at LeWeb:

    WebProNews discusses the year’s top memes with Know Your Meme:

    Google’s Atmosphere 2011:

    Google Mobile ads – ebookers case study EMEA:

    The new Twitter (yes, another new Twitter):

    Insert stupid PageRank joke here:

    Google’s new news reader app:

    “High tech lynch mob” (featuring Google’s Louis Gray):

    Working at Google Krakow:

  • Google’s “Not Provided” Referrals Growing In Percentage?

    Last month, Google announced that it would begin encrypting search queries with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) as the default experience at Google.com for users who are logged in to their Google accounts.

    As a result, there is a lot data that was once available in Google Analytics for webmasters is now hidden. “When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google ‘organic’ search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site,” said Amy Chang on the Google Analytics blog. “Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google ‘cpc’.”

    “We are still measuring all SEO traffic. You will still be able to see your conversion rates, segmentations, and more,” she adds. “To help you better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token ‘not provided)’ within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in user visits will be affected. Note that ‘cpc’ paid search data is not affected.”

    Naturally, SEOs were not thrilled with the move. WebProNews talked to a handful of well-known industry vets about the subject recently:

    Conductor has put together some research (hat tip: Search Engine Watch) indicating that the percentage of sites’ natural search traffic that is being labeled “not provided” by Google has grown dramatically since the change was announced.

    “The percentage of traffic (not provided) grew from less than 1% in the week immediately after the launch, to 8.875% of traffic from Nov. 18-Nov. 20th (although not a full week.),” says Conductor’s Nathan Safran.

    Conductor Research

    As you can see, that’s a pretty significant jump, especially considering that Google downplayed the change’s impact as “affecting only a minority of your traffic.” Although technically, 49% would still be a “minority”.

    It’s worth noting that Google is doing everything in its power to get people using actual Google accounts. Namely Google+. The more Google can grow the amount of people with accounts and profiles, the more likely people are going to be using Google signed in, so it would be no surprise whatsoever to see that percentage of “not provided” keep going up.

    A second graph from Conductor shows that while the number has gone up significantly since the change was first made, that growth does seem to have slowed down a bit. This graph references what Safran calls “5 high traffic websites – 2 online retailers, 3 service providers”.

    Conductor research

    While the first graph shows that overall, the percentage is close to 9%, the second graph shows that it clearly varies from site to site. Safran points to a recent survey from SEOmoz, which had the number as high as 12% for the average.

    Google’s Matt Cutts had estimated the effects to be in the “single-digit” percentages.

  • Google Analytics Gets Non-Interaction Event Tracking

    Google announced the addition of non-interaction events to its set of event tracking metrics.

    “”But wait!’ you ask, ‘How can an event-which measures user interaction-be non-interactive? And why would I want that anyway?,” says Patricia Boswell of the Google Analytics Team. “The answer is simple: sometimes you want to track passive events on your pages, like images from an automatic slide show. In this case, you want such events to be excluded from bounce rate calculations because they don’t track visitor interaction. Now, you can mark these events as non-interaction events, so that they don’t affect the bounce rate for the page.”

    She uses an example of an image slide show that automatically serves up 5 images in rotating order on a site’s homepage. “You want to apply an event tracking call with each movement of the slider, so that you know which images are being seen most by visitors to your home page,” says Boswell. “However, there isn’t really any interaction required on the visitors’ behalf to engage with this slider. You know that in the past, event tracking for this slider would make the bounce rate for your home page drop dramatically. Better to exclude these events from bounce rate calculation, so that the bounce rate for your home page is calculated only from pageviews for the page and not events.”

    Non interaction events

    She explains how to use the code in this blog post.

    There’s been a lot going on with Google Analytics this month. For one, Google announced that it would make encrypted search the default for signed in users of Google.com, meanwhile blocking specific referral data. This hasn’t gone over incredibly well with the webmaster community. There’s even a petition aimed at getting Google to reconsider.

    Google also started letting Analytics users get Webmaster Tools data in their GA accounts, an extension of a previously launched pilot program.

    Finally, Google announced Flow Visualization in Google Analytics, which lets you analyze insights in a visual way, to help you better understand how visitors flow throughout the pages of your site.

  • Flow Visualization Comes to Google Analytics

    Flow Visualization Comes to Google Analytics

    Google announced the launch of Flow Visualization in Google Analytics. This is described as a tool that lets you analyze site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site.

    There are actually two flow visualizations upon launch: Visitors Flow and Goal Flow. These will be rolling out to all accounts starting this week. More visualizations will come out later.

    Visitors Flow shows who visitors flow through your site by traffic source or other dimensions, and see the path they take to the exit. This could be a pretty helpful tool in analyzing bounces and exits and useful for trying to reduce them. This visualization is shown in the image above.

    “Nodes are automatically clustered according to an intelligence algorithm that groups together the most likely visitor flow through a site,” explains Phil Mui of the Google Analytics team. “You’ll also notice that we made the visualization highly interactive. You can interact with the graph to highlight different pathways, and to see information about specific nodes and connections. For example, if you want to dive deeper into your “specials” set of pages, you can hover over the node to see more at a glance.”

    Goal Flow, pictured below, shows how visitors flow through your goal steps and where they dropped off. ” Because the goal steps are defined by the site owner, they should reflect the important steps and page groups of interest to the site,” says Mui. “In this first iteration, we’re supporting only URL goals, but we’ll soon be adding events and possibly other goal types.”

    Goal Flow  

    He says Goal Flow helps you understand the relative volume of visits by dimension (traffic, source, campaign, browser), the rates at which visitors abandon different paths, where and how visitors navigate the steps you define, and how they interact with your site (in terms of things like backtracking to previous goal steps).

    Any advanced segments can be applied to a Flow Visualizer, and you can even visualize “backward” to see reverse paths to “identify suboptimal content”.

    In the comments on Google’s announcement, people are already calling the feature a game changer. Do you agree?

  • Google Encrypted Search Means No Info For Individual Queries

    Google announced that it is going to begin encrypting search queries with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) as the default experience at Google.com when you search logged into your Google account. http://www.google.com will become https://www.google.com.

    “This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe,” says Google product manager Evelyn Kao.

    There’s a chance that your Google experience will be slower with SSL because the computer your’e using has to establish a secure connection with Google. This is interesting, considering that Google has put so much effort into speeding things up.

    It’s worth noting that you can just go to https://www.google.com when you’re signed out, and still use encrypted search.

    Naturally, webmasters and SEOs are contemplating the effects this will have on search engine optimization and analytics.

    Sites visited from Google’s organic listings will be able to tell that the traffic is coming from Google, but they won’t be able to receive info about each individual query. They will, however, receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to the site for each of the past 30 days in Webmaster Tools.

    “This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic,” says Kao. “If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.”

    “When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google ‘organic’ search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site,” says Amy Chang on the Google Analytics blog. “Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google ‘cpc’.”

    “We are still measuring all SEO traffic. You will still be able to see your conversion rates, segmentations, and more,” she adds. “To help you better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token ‘not provided)’ within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in user visits will be affected. Note that ‘cpc’ paid search data is not affected.”

    Google is making the encrypted search available on all of its search properties except for Maps.

  • Google Analytics Gets Webmaster Tools Data, New Search Reports

    Google is letting Google Analytics users get Webmaster Tools data in their GA accounts, so they can surface Google search data in GA.

    Several months ago, Google launched a pilot program, but now, the new set of reports is available to everyone. “The Webmaster Tools section contains three reports based on the Webmaster Tools data that we hope will give you a better sense of how your site performs in search results,” says Google Analytics Associate Product Manager Kate Cushing. “We’ve created a new section for these reports called Search Engine Optimization that will live under the Traffic Sources section.”

    That includes reports for queries (impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries, Landing Pages (impressions, clicks, position and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages) and Geographical Summary (impressions, clicks and CTR by country).

    Google says it has made various improvements to the reports based on feedback from the pilot program.

    Perhaps these reports will help webmasters who have been affected by Google’s Panda update figure out some things.

    Users must link their WMT and GA accounts obviously. To do so, go to the WMT homepage, click “manage site” next to the site you want and click “Google Analytics” property. Select the property you want to associate with the site and just save it.

  • Google Panda Update: Could Inaccurate Google Data Be Costing Sites Traffic?

    Google Panda Update: Could Inaccurate Google Data Be Costing Sites Traffic?

    Late last week, it was discovered that Google had rolled out another version of the Panda update earlier in the week. Industry voices have dubbed the update “2.5”. Google dubbed it “one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”

    Did you notice a drop or increase in traffic in the past week or so? Let us know.

    SearchMetrics put out lists of the top winners and losers from the update. Some sites were surprising, some weren’t. Interestingly enough, eHow and EzineArticles, which were previously “pandalized” were not on the loser list this time. EzineArticles would not offer comment, and eHow (Demand Media) told us that they’ve been pleased with the results of a massive content clean-up initiative they’ve implemented this year.

    Another previous victim, HubPages, was even able to make the winners list this time around. Some of the more surprising “losers” were press release distribution services Business Wire (which actually just patented its SEO strategy) and PR Newswire, and tech blog TheNextWeb. There have been some questions raised over the accuracy of the SearchMetrics data, however.

    “I’m glad to say we had a good summer as far as traffic is concerned,” Rod Nicolson, VP User Experience Design & Workflow for PR Newswire tells us. “We’ll continue to monitor closely, but so far we’re not seeing any unusual changes to our traffic due to Panda 2.5.”

    TheNextWeb Editor in Chief Zee Kane tells us, “We haven’t noticed any effect right now but we’re still digging in. Will hopefully know more over the course of the next week.”

    We’ve reached out to SearchMetrics for comment, but are still awaiting a response. We’ll update when we receive one.

    Update: Here’s what SearchMetrics tells us about its data:

    We monitor a selected and representative set of keywords for Google (in several countries) once a week and analyze the search results pages for these keywords. One of the main indices we calculate from this is the Organic Search Engine Visibility. This is a culmination of figures collated from search volume (ie how often people are searching for a keyword or phrase) and how often and on which position (ie what position on a Google results page) a domain/web site appears. Add them all up (plus some more math applied) and you get the performance index – an estimate for how visible a site is on Google in a specific country.

    The basis for our analysis is a local keyword set for every country we analyze. Our values are local, that’s why we can give you an overview over the SEO and SEM visibility per country. The keyword sets are representative and varied between some hundred thousand and 10 million. The keyword sets are extended every month with new keywords added and irrelevant / outdated keywords deleted.

    While we track millions of keywords, we obviously don’t track every single keyword that is searched. We can be viewed as providing a very good indication of underlying trends. However, results can be off when, for example, a web site has only a very small visibility and is ranking for a small number of keywords or a higher percentage of the keywords a domain is ranking for is not included in our keyword set.

    Please note: Visibility is not the same as traffic. Further, sites that are listed among a ‘losers’ list may still generate traffic from other sources and can still potentially continue to prosper. Our data can only be used as a trend for search engine visibility on Google. But Google isn’t the only traffic source websites can have. So, if a site experiences a reduction in Google visibility, it may still continue to generate good traffic to and continue to prosper. Other sources of traffic include real ‘type-in’ traffic (when visitors type in a URL); social media traffic (ie from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other); and affiliate traffic etc.

    DaniWeb, which has been an ongoing sub-plot of the Panda storyline throughout the year, due to its victimization and full recovery, was hit again by the most recent update. In fact, Dani Horowitz, who runs the IT discussion community, is the one that tipped us that this was even going on.

    Horowitz and her team have of course been doing some investigating themselves, and documenting this a bit in a Google support forum. In it, she writes:

    So, everyone, thanks to DaniWeb’s handy dandy systems administrator, we have come to a conclusion. Our ‘time on site’ statistic decreased by 75% at 1 pm on August 11th, and has been holding steady at the reduced number, as a result of Google Analytics rolling out their new session management feature.

    There have been MANY reports across the web of the bounce rate and time on site being inaccurate every since August 11th, especially when multiple 301 redirects are involved (which we use heavily).

    As a result, we have been hit by Panda. Or so I gather.

    Now, this is not confirmed, but could a Google Analytics change, and inaccurate data on Google’s part be responsible for sites losing over half of their traffic? If so, that’s not cool.

    Google, who famously won’t reveal its secret recipe for search rankings or even list each of the factors without revealing the weight of each, has been historically vague about its use of Google Analytics metrics in search. Michael Gray recently wrote a post suggesting that you can almost guarantee that Google is using your Analytics data, but he mentions how Google always manages to sidestep questions about its use (or non-use) of data for bounce rate, exit rate, time on site, etc.

    Another interesting side-story to the Panda saga is that Google-owned sites have done well (according to the Searchmetrics data). The timing of the most recent Panda update, which Searchmetrics counts YouTube and Android.com as major winners for, is interesting given recent Senate discussions about Google favoring its own content in search results. A Google spokesperson gave us the following statement on the matter:

    “Our intent is to rank web search results in order to deliver the most relevant answers to users. Each change we make goes through a process of rigorous scientific testing, and if we don’t believe that a change will help users, we won’t launch the change. In particular, last week’s Panda change was a result of bringing more data into our algorithms.”

    The Panda update has appeared to favor video content throughout its various iterations (and not just YouTube). I can tell you that video has some major SEO benefits regardless of Panda, and that it is also great for increasing time on site. If a user is watching a video on your page, they’re on the page for the duration of the video or at least until they lose interest (so use good video content).

    Even Demand Media told us after they announced the eHow clean-up, that it wouldn’t much affect its YouTube strategy.

    Update: Dani Horowitz tells us that DaniWeb has already recovered. More here.

    Do you think Google is improving its search results with the Panda update? Let us know what you think in the comments.

  • Google Launches Important New Tools for Webmasters

    Google made a couple relatively quiet announcements this week that have pretty big ramifications for webmasters who want to get more traffic to their sites.

    If you’re a Webmaster Tools user, you can thank Google for a new “Site Health” feature. In a nutshell, it’s Google’s way of helping you prioritize what you’re doing in WMT by highlighting the “health problems” your site has. In fact, they’ve even redesigned the homepage around this concept.

    Do you like the new design? Share your opinion in the comments.

    The thinking is that you can see what needs attention the most, in order, according to Google. Given how much sites generally rely on Google for the majority of their traffic, whose advice would you rather take in this department?

    If you don’t want to see sites listed by priority, you have the ability to view them alphabetically like before.

    webmaster tools homepage  

    Site Health  

    The new home page is only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your account, but they don’t all have to be verified. Google says it will be available for all accounts in the future. If you have over 100, you can still access Site Health info from the top of the dashboard for each site.

    So what’s included in this site health data? Malware detection, important pages that have been removed with Google’s URL removal tool, and important pages that are blocked from crawling in robots.txt.

    Google will provide additional info about any of these things as they’re found.

    In a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa writes, “A word about ‘important pages: ‘as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on ‘important pages.’ Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web > Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.”

    “Obviously these three issues—malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs—aren’t the only things that can make a website ‘unhealthy;’ in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site,” she adds. “But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.”

    It’s important to note that it may take several days for Google’s health warnings to go away after you fix the problems. Hopefully they can do something to speed that up in the future as well. If you’re still seeing it after a week, Moskwa says, the problem may not be resolved.

    Feedback from webmasters about site health has been generally positive, but some still want more. For example, on Moskwa’s post, Antonio Ooi comments, “We’re more interested to know what is missing, critical level (high, moderate, low) and recommended action/solution. For example, which image alt, meta tags, video sitemap etc are missing/invalid and how to fix. Or what else that has yet to be implemented on our site to take advantage of the new Google search engine’s cool features and so on. This will not only make us work smarter, this will also make Google team work smarter.”

    Another commenter going by “knowj” says, “It would be a great feature if the Webmasters Tools API allowed developers to feed error reports/logs into for websites/applications.This could generate an RSS feed/alerts ordered by priority/severity. This would create a useful single location for keeping track of the health of websites.”

    What do you think? What else should Google show you as part of its site health feature? Let us know in the comments.

    Now on the Analytics side of things…

    In addition to launching a premium version of Google Analytics for bigger sites, Google announced the launch of Real-Time Analytics. What this means is that you can now see how your traffic is coming in as it happens, which could be huge for helping you shape your promotion strategies, and play to your strengths.

    Essentially, it can help you do what you’re already doing with the data you get from Google Analytics and do it faster.

    “One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet,” says John Jersin of Google’s Analytics team. “With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic.”

    “For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post,” he adds. “By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.”

    He says he also uses real-time analytics to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a new campaign.

    The new real-time reports are only available in the new version of Google Analytics. You can find a link to the new version at the top of Google Analytics if you’re not already using it. So far, only a few users have access to the reports, but they will be available for all in the coming weeks.

    Do you think real-time analytics data will help you improve the your site’s traffic? Tell us what you think.

  • Google Analytics Real-Time Launches for Real Time Traffic Data

    Google announced the launch of a new set of reports in Google Analytics today, which shows you what’s happening with your site as it happens. Pretty cool.

    It’s called Google Analytics Real-Time (fittingly).

    “One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet. With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic,” says John Jersin of the Google Analytics team. “For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post. By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.”

    Realtime Analytics

    “Another way I’m using Real-Time is to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a campaign,” he says. “When getting ready to launch a new campaign it’s critical to make sure your measurement plan is working before you start driving visitors to the page. With the Real-Time reports you can find out in seconds whether you’re getting the data you want in Google Analytics.”

    Users can find the reports in the new version of Google Analytics. They didn’t bother to add it to the old one. You should have access to it from a link at the top of GA. If you’re not already using the new version, this might be a feature that makes you go ahead and switch. You’re going to have to get used to the new version sooner or later anyway.

    Now, if they could just get realtime search back.

    Google also announced Google Analytics Premium for its biggest customers. It comes with extra processing power, advanced analysis, service/support, and guarantees. More on this here.

  • Google Makes Site Search Analytics Easier

    Google is making it easier for site owners who use Google Custom Search to add Google Analytics Site Search tracking from their custom search engine.

    “Google Analytics Site Search reports provide extensive data on how people search your site once they are already on it.  You can see initial searches, refinements, search trends, which pages they searched from, where they ended up, and conversion correlation.  In the past we admit that setup was a little challenging,” says Google software engineer Zhong Wang.

    “If you are already a Google Analytics user (and your site has the Google Analytics tracking code on its pages), go to the Custom Search Engine management page, select your CSE’s control panel and click on Google Analytics from the left-hand menu,” explains Wang. “We’ll display a list of your Google Analytics web properties so you can select one and tell us the query and category parameters that you want to track.”

    Site Search Analytics

    When changes are saved, Google generates a new code snippet that you can copy and paste into your site. Then, you can access Site Search reports from the content section in Google Analytics.

    In other Google Analytics news, sites in German got the go ahead to start using it, as Google announced in a German blog post. More on that here.

  • Google Gets Around Analytics Issues in Germany

    Google Gets Around Analytics Issues in Germany

    Early this year, reports surfaced that the German government would possibly fine businesses for using Google Analytics, saying that the tool violates people’s privacy, but Google said at the time:

    “Google Analytics complies with European data protection laws and is used by other European data protection authorities on their own websites.”

    Reports indicated that German officials had ended talks with Google to resolve the issue, but Google said it would continue “actively working to address their concerns.”

    Apparently there was some progress made, as Google has put up a post on its German AdWords blog. “While the use of Google Analytics in our opinion is not against the German and European data protection law, had German data protection authorities in the past to have a dissenting view,” says Google Data Protection Commissioner, Germany, Per Meyerdierks (as translated by Google). “We have worked closely with these authorities – represented by the Hamburg Institute for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Officer – concerns regarding the collaborated and implemented a number of improvements to Google Analytics.”

    Meyerdierks says the following government requirements must be met for those who wish to use Google Analytics in Germany (also as translated by Google):

    • Please mention in your privacy policy that Google Analytics is used on your website.
    • Implement the IP mask function instructs the Google Analytics to not save the full IP address of your users or to process.
    • Instruct in your privacy policy on the possibility of disabling the Google Analytics function using a browser add-on to. End users can, if desired, to prevent very easy by installing this browser add-on that analysis information can be sent to Google. This possibility exists for over a year for Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer is now available for Safari and Opera and has proven successful and efficient solution for users.
    • We have updated Terms introduced to include with the data protection authorities coordinated arrangements for data processing.

    An official statement from German officials can be found here (in German).

  • Why You Can Almost Guarantee Google is Using Your Analytics Data

    Why You Can Almost Guarantee Google is Using Your Analytics Data

    While many webmasters and publishers use Google analytics without a second thought, smart publishers, marketers, and SEOs are left to speculate… Is Google using this data? What might they use it for? And am I doing myself more harm than good using it?

    Truth be told, unless Google ever does a full disclosure about analytics data (which to date hasn’t happened), we are left to conjecture and guess. However, if we look at Google’s business decisions, especially since Larry Page has assumed control, the only conclusion you can logically come to is that yes, they are using it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

    Conference attendees have been using Q&A sessions to try and pin down Google engineers about whether or not they are using bounce rate, exit rate, time on site, or other specific factors. But, by asking these narrow questions, they allow the engineers to sidestep the real question with carefully worded answers. What we need to do is stop trying to figure out exactly what factors they are using so we can try and exploit them–instead, we need to get answers to the larger question: “Is data from Google analytics currently used in search engine ranking pages?” Why is focusing on Google’s use of one factor bad? Much like that kid in class who asked “Is this going to be on the test?” you’ve lost the plot. That kid has stopped focusing on learning and simply wants a good grade by regurgitating specific facts back to the teacher. It’s unlikely that Google is looking at any single factor; instead, they are looking at more than one aspect to determine overall quality. Engineers from Google constantly tell us to stop focusing on these narrow factors (like pagerank) and focus on the big picture and what it says about our website.

    Ever since Larry Page has assumed control, one of his big focuses has been shuttering some of Google’s non profitable projects, like Google Labs. It’s not that Google is no longer innovating; it’s that they are taking a more pragmatic approach. Projects need to be cost effective, and they’re not giving them the same length of time as they did in the past to get to that point.

    Let’s take a look at analytics. Maintaining uptime for the massive number of sites that Google analytics runs on requires a huge investment in hardware, software, and skilled engineers and technically skilled labor. Next we need to add in the programmers, Q&A, and resources associated with maintaining and updating the user interface/reporting side of gGoogle analytics. Simply put, it’s a huge investment of time, resources, and money. With Google’s recent shift in direction about projects needing to be profitable to stay alive, there simply isn’t any logical conclusion you can reach except that they are using the data. There’s a true saying about this situation: “if you aren’t paying for a product or service, you are the product being sold“.

    There are multiple business uses for this data, including forcing up prices on adwords keywords, determining adwords quality scores, understanding consumer usage, and validating organic search engine ranking factors–to name just a few. Yes, Google adwords may have started as a supply/demand bid driven market system, but once adwords quality score got factored in, it became a black box model and prices could be raised artificially as needed. Don’t believe me? Try and explain why quality score forces me to bid $5 to display ads for my own name in adwords, but I can show ads for Matt Cutts for $0.30. Unless, of course, you want to defend the bizarro logic that I am more relevant for someone else’s name than I am for my own.

    The real takeaway here is that Google is the data Borg. Without feeding the Borg signals that people are visiting, using, and returning to your site, you have little chance of ranking organically. These are the types of signals that real businesses and brands will send the search engines. These are the signals that become difficult and expensive to fake without large distributed botnets, malware, or hacking. The question you need to ask yourself is at what point does it become easier to spend more time building these signals the right way and less time on faking it via black hat spam techniques …

    Check out Graywolf’s SEO Blog for more articles by Michael Gray

  • Add Multiple AdWords Accounts to One Google Analytics Account

    Add Multiple AdWords Accounts to One Google Analytics Account

    Google announced that you can now link multiple AdWords accounts to a single Google Analytics account. This functionality comes with a new “data sources” section in the account settings in GA, where you can use auto-tagging with multiple AdWords accounts and import AdWords data into GA.

    Google provides a step-by-step walk through for setting this up here.

    Multiple AdWords accounts in Google Analytics

    Multiple AdWords accounts in Google Analytics

    “Before you start, make sure that you’re using a Google account that has access to both your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, and is an Administrator for the Analytics account,” notes Gavin Doolan of the Google Analytics Team.

    In addition to this new functionality, Google has also made it easier to import Adwords data into multiple profiles in GA:

  • Google Adds Multi-Channel Funnels to Google Analytics

    Google announced a new set of five reports in Google Analytics today called Multi-Channel Funnels.

    In Analytics, conversions and ecommerce transactions are credited to the last campaign, search, or ad that referred the visitor when he or she converted,” Google says in the help center. “But what role did prior website referrals, searches and ads play in that conversion? How much time passed between the visitor’s initial interest and his or her purchase?”

    “The Multi-Channel Funnels reports answer these questions and others by showing how your marketing channels (i.e. sources of traffic to your website) work together to create sales and conversions,” it says.

    The reports are generated from conversion paths and sequences of interactions (clicks/referrals) from the 30 days that led up to each conversion/transaction. Conversion path data looks at paid/organic search, referral sites, affiliates, social networks, email newsletters, display ads, custom campaigns, etc.

    Here are a couple videos about Multi-channel funnels, including a walk-through:

    Google Analytics users can use the reports by clicking on the My Conversions tab. AdWords customers are encouraged to link their accounts with their Analytics accounts.

    Starting today, Google says, uses will see complete data in the reports for the past two months, but they’ll be expanding it to include data dating back to January over the coming days.

  • Google Analytics Update: Better Understanding of Site Interactions

    Google announced an update to sessions in Google Analytics. The company says it will lead to a “clearer understanding of website interactions.”

    As it stands now, GA ends a session when over 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor, at the end of the day, and when a visitor closes their browser. In such cases, the next pageview from the visitor will start a new session.

    Now, GA will end a session when over 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor, at the end of the day, and when any traffic source value for the user changes.

    Google says traffic source info includes:

    • utm_source
    • utm_medium
    • utm_term
    • utm_content
    • utm_id
    • utm_campaign
    • gclid

    @googleanalytics
    Google Analytics    Update to Sessions in Google Analytics: http://t.co/fQys3IR #measure #googleanalytics 3 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    Trevor Claiborne of the Google Analytics team says on the Analytics Blog:

    This change only applies for visits going forward from today, and your historical data will not change. We’re bringing the definition of session in line with the common definition of a visit. If a visitor leaves your site and returns soon after with a different traffic source value, each visit will be measured with its own session.

    Since Google Analytics will start new sessions for all new campaign information, sessions will now have the more accurate attribution information. This will be especially helpful if you use Multi-Channel Funnels. Additionally, by continuing a session when the user closes their browser for only a very short time, sessions will more accurately model a user’s engagement with the website. Overall, this change may slightly increase the number of visits. Based on our research, most users will see less than a 1% change.

    Google also added some stuff to custom reports in Google Analytics this week. This includes 45 new metrics/dimensions, a simplified report builder and the ability to build entire groups of reports.

    Google Analytics Custom Reports

  • Google Adds +1 Button Data to Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools

    Google announced the addition of +1 button data to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. These new metrics can show you how the +1 button actually affects the traffic to your site.

    In WMT, there is a Search Impact report, which shows how +1’s affect your organic search traffic. “You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out,” says Google software engineer Dan Rodney. “Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.”

    An Activity report shows how many times your pages have been +1’d, from buttons on your site, as well as on other pages like Google Search.

    An Audience report will show you aggregate geographic and demographic data about who is using the +1 button with your content. Google only shows this info, however, when a “significant” number of users have +1’d pages. They don’t say what number they consider “significant” to be.

    Users will find a +1 Metrics menu on the side of the page, where each of these reports will be able to be found.

    @googleanalytics
    Google Analytics    Track your +1s in Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools http://goo.gl/2547K 1 hour ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

    Google is also showing how users share content using other buttons with Social Plugin Tracking in Google Analytics. This includes a Social Engagement report, which shows how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons and other social buttons. “This allows you to determine, for example, whether people who +1 your pages during a visit are likely to spend more time on your site than people who don’t,” says Rodney.

    Also included are the Social Actions report, which tracks the number of social actions taken on your site, and the Social Pages report, which lets you compare pages on your site to see which are driving the most social actions.

    “Over the next few days (and if you’re using the default version of the latest Google Analytics tracking code), if you’ve added +1 buttons to your site we’ll automatically enable Social Plugin Tracking for +1 in your account,” Rodney says. “You can enable tracking for other social plugins in just a few simple steps.”

  • Compete: Comparing Our Data to Google Analytics is Apples and Oranges

    Compete, as you may know, provides analytics tools, and shows website traffic data on things like unique visitors, pageviews, visits, etc. The data is sometimes compared to Google analytics, and often tells a different story.

    We reached out to Compete to discuss this a bit, and Damian Roskill, Managing Director, Marketing at Compete tells us, “It’s really like comparing apples and oranges – both methodologies have their strengths and their weaknesses.  Google Analytics doesn’t actually track people – it tracks cookies.  This means that when people change computers, or delete their cookies, you can have double counting that goes on.”

    Compete’s methodology has four basic components. They are (as described in a Compete white paper):

    1. Multi-source panel – combines both recruited panelists and licensed clickstream data from partners, resulting in a very large and representative online consumer panel;
    2. Harmonization algorithms – proprietary processes and technology that work together to integrate Compete’s multiple data sources into a unified online
      consumer panel;
    3. Sophisticated normalization techniques – unique processes that weight, calibrate and project metrics across panel sources resulting in accurate base audience measurement data;
    4. Metrics that matter – analytics on site visitation, audience profiles, media exposure, search term usage, cross-shopping, conversion, competitive behaviors, and audience segmentation

    “In contrast, a panel is a sample-based approach – we track about 2 million US consumers – a percentage of the total internet audience here in the US – and then we use computer modeling to project behavior from our panel to the general internet audience,” says Roskill. “The upside is that a person is a person – you don’t have the double-counting.  The downside is that you can sometimes get undercounting of smaller websites.”

    “Also notice that we are currently only doing US consumers – so people often send us a Google Analytics number that includes all international users as well as US consumers – the two aren’t comparable in that way either.”

    Certainly an important point to note.
     
    “Bottom line, the approaches are complementary rather than either/or – what should make sense is that the two methodologies should be similar directionally.  But comparing the numbers doesn’t really provide much value.”

    In my experience, they generally are similar directionally in most cases.
     
    “What we think can be meaningful is combining the two approaches – essentially using a cookie-based approach and combine it with a panel based approach and use them to provide validation for each other,” says Roskill.

    The fact is that you can compare data from any number of analytics tools, and you’re going to get different results. It’s when they tell dramatically different stories that you need to investigate further. Luckily there are resources explaining how data is collected. Compete’s white paper, for example explains its methodology. Google Analytics has an entire help center, and there are plenty of articles on the web discussing it.